Last week's item represented my 52nd consecutive week of posting on Substack. I'm happy, and perhaps a little surprised, to have hit that milestone. When I started, I had 30-40 essays in my pile – some finished, some half-baked, some barely started, and all with no clear future after it became apparent that they weren’t likely to coalesce into a book. I expected that I would put something online every week, work my way through the pile, and wind up after 30 or 40 weeks. Apparently, there has been something either in the weekly deadline or in my broader life that has prompted me to keep generating additional essays, despite their lack of marketability.
Out of the last year’s 52 items, I count 31 that have some element of philosophy in them, 25 that have an element of technology in them, six that have an element of art in them, and then one or two each that relate to music, writing, memoir, or money. (Many items are in two or more categories, so these numbers don’t add up to 52). That seems like a reasonable approximation of where my interests are when I am writing one of these items. It seems like my writing brain is almost evenly split between philosophy and technology, with a notable but small smattering of art and other topics mixed in.
I also looked at which of the items I was pretty sure about vs. which ones were more open-ended or uncertain: it feels to me like only 6 were obviously speculative or questioning, while in the other 46 I was pretty confident about the subject matter. Those statistics surprise me, because I so often feel uncertain as I’m writing. A plausible interpretation is that I develop confidence as I develop a piece, and most items don’t go on Substack while I’m still unsure of them.
The other key number, of course, is what percentage of Substack writers I am “beating” this week. I’ve written previously about the way that Substack eggs writers on with a weekly congratulation message, including the percentage of writers who haven’t maintained that long a streak. The readout there has been a little inconsistent, and it’s hard to tell whether that inconsistency is a glitch in the data or a consequence of rounding.
From week 40 through week 48, Substack told me I was doing better than 94% of writers. At week 49, I was doing better than 95% of writers, but then at week 50 I was back to 94%. At weeks 51 and 52 I was back at 95% again. Obviously the distinction is at some level meaningless, but it was an intriguing experience when I got the 50-week “rollback” to 94%. I had to go back to the previous week’s message to confirm my recollection that I had indeed hit the 95% mark.
Mathematically, it would seem like this percentage should be monotonically increasing: other writers can only drop out, and there is no way that another writer (“competing” with me) could somehow catch up or rejoin a longer-streak cohort. In a more data-science or statistics perspective, it’s easy to see that various kinds of edge effects in the aggregation of this data might mean that I was just above 94.5% one week, then just below 94.5% the next week, leading to an apparent rollback that’s just an artifact.
I don’t know if I will be able to do another full year of weekly items, but I’m certainly continuing on the same course. My pile of candidate half-baked material is somewhat smaller than it was when I started, and doesn’t have as many items that are clearly ready to go as it did a year ago. Balancing that, I think I have developed my skills of both creating an initial rough draft and refining it subsequently.
I have read about people like Alice Monroe, who would labor over every sentence to produce a jewel-like story, and there is part of me that wants to do that. What fun it might be to really work at a single piece until it just can’t be made any better. At the same time, I recognize that in the absence of a weekly deadline, I would likely let all the other “stuff” of my life crowd out writing entirely.